"None that I could see," he said.
"How about tire impressions?" Helen asked.
"Probably every kind of tire made in the western world has been through here. Did y'all know this guy?" Mack said.
"He moved back here from L.A. He used to sell burial insurance," Helen said.
I looked at the small man in tattered clothes sitting against the tree trunk outside the tape "Is that the guy who found the victim?"
"Yeah, good luck. I get the impression he's a traveling wine connoisseur," Mack said.
I stepped outside the crime-scene tape and squatted down eye-level with the man in tattered clothes. His skin was grimed with dirt and he wore a greasy cap crimped down on his head. Like all men of his kind, his origins, the people who had conceived him, the place or home where he grew up had probably long ago ceased being of any importance to him.
"You were sleeping by the tracks?" I said.
"I fell off the train. I was pretty much knocked out," he said.
"Did you see or hear anything that might be helpful to us?" I asked.
"I told it to that other guy." He nodded toward Mack Bertrand.
"Nothing bad is going to happen to you, podna. You're not going to jail. We're not holding you as a material witness. All those things are off the table Just tell me what you saw."
He wiped his nose with his wrist. "Late last night I heard some thing go 'pop." Then I heard it again. Maybe twice. Then a pickup truck drove off."
"Did you see the driver?"
"No."
"What did the pickup truck look like?"
"Just a truck. It was going down toward the bridge there."
"Why'd you come across the road this morning?"
"They got free coffee at the hospital," he replied.
My knees ached when I stood up. I took two dollars from my wallet and gave it to him. "There's a donut shop back toward town. Why don't you get yourself something to eat?" I said. I started to walk away from him.
"I seen something go flying out the truck window. Under the streetlight. Down toward the drawbridge. I don't know if that's any help to you or not," he said.
A few minutes later the coroner arrived. Later, the paramedics unzipped a black body bag and placed the remains of Leon Hebert inside it and lifted it onto a gurney. Mack Bertrand fiddled with his pipe and put it between his teeth, upside down. He was a family man, a Little League coach and regular churchgoer and usually not given to a public expression of sentiment.
"You asked why the victim grabbed the shooter's shoe," he said. "He was asking for mercy."
I waited for him to continue. But he didn't.
"Go on, Mack," Helen said.
"That's all. He had a sucking chest wound and couldn't speak. It was probably like drowning while somebody watched. So he tried to beg with his hand. He must have been a bad judge of character."
"How's that?" I asked.
"Whoever did this poor bastard wanted him to go out as hard as possible," Mack said.
Helen and I and a uniformed deputy searched along the edges of the road by the drawbridge, looking for the object the hobo said he had seen thrown from the fleeing pickup truck. But we found nothing of consequence. Helen dropped me at my house and I shaved and showered and drove to the office. At 9:15 a.m. I called the office of Dr. Parks. The receptionist said he would not be in. I called his home.
"What do you want, Mr. Robicheaux?" he said.
"How did you know it was "
"Caller ID. What's the problem now?"
"I'd like to come out to your house a few minutes."
"You're not welcome at my house."
"Sorry to hear you say that," I replied.
I drove up Loreauville Road, through horse-farm country and fields bursting with mature sugarcane, under a hard blue sky you could have scratched with a nail. The air was cool and sweet smelling, like cinnamon burned on a woodstove, and through the cypress and oak trees that lined the Teche the sunlight glittered like goldleaf on the water's surface.
But when I turned into Dr. Parks's driveway I seemed to enter a separate reality. His house was covered with shadow, the air cold, the birdbaths and empty fishpond and flagstone walkways moss stained and smelling of night-damp. The back end of a battered beige pickup truck stuck out of a shed in the rear of the house. Next to it was a stack of hay bales with a plastic bull's-eye pinned to them and a dozen arrows embedded in the straw. I had to ring the bell twice before he answered the door.
He was unshaved, the whites of his eyes shiny with a yellow cast, as though he had jaundice, a sour odor emanating from his clothes.
"Say it," he said.
"May I come in?" I asked.
"Suit yourself," he said, and walked deeper into the house.
We entered a large, cheerless room with an unlit gas log fireplace and dark paneling on the walls and windows covered by thick velvet curtains. Track lights on the ceiling were focused on a huge gun case that was filled with both modern and antique firearms.
"That's quite a collection," I said.
"Get to it, Detective," he said.
"Somebody waxed Leon Hebert last night. Somebody who really had it in for him."
"That breaks me up."
"You own a .38 or a nine-Mike?"
"A what?"
"A nine-millimeter."
"Yeah, a half dozen of them."
"You drive your pickup truck last night?"
"No."
"Where were you last night?"
"Home, with Mrs. Parks. And that's the last question I'm answering without my attorney being present."
We were standing no more than one foot apart. I could see the fatigue in his face, the sag in his skin, the manic shine of grief and anger in his eyes.
"My second wife died at the hands of violent men, Dr. Parks. The sonsofbitches who did it are all dead and I'm glad. But their deaths never brought me peace," I said.
"Is that your evangelical moment for the day?"
"I recommend you not leave town."
"One question?" he said.
"Go ahead."
"Did Hebert see it coming? Because I hope that motherfucker suffered just the way my daughter did before he caught the bus."
I left his house without answering his question. There are times as a law officer when you wish you did not have to look into the soul of another, even a grieving victim's.
That afternoon a seventeen-year-old black kid by the name of Pete Delahoussaye came into my office. Pete was over six feet and walked like he was made from coat hanger wire, but he had a fast ball that came down the chute like a B.B. and LSU and the University of Texas had both offered him athletic scholarships. Seven days a week, at 5:00 A.M." Pete and his widowed mother delivered the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate from one end of town to the other.
He stood in front of my desk, a paper sack hanging from his left hand.
"What's happening', Pete?" I said.
"Found something early this morning. Thought maybe I should bring it in," he said.
"Oh?"
"Yeah," he said, sticking his hand in the bag. "I was passing Iberia General, going toward Jeanerette, when something come sailing out of a pickup."
"Whoa," I said, rising from my chair, just as he lifted a-blue-black, pearl-handled revolver from the paper sack. I could see the leaded ends of bullets inside the cylinder. I stepped away from the muzzle and took the gun from him.
"How much have you handled this, partner?" I asked.
"A little bit," he replied, his eyes leaving mine.
"Did anyone else handle it?"
"No, suh."
"Did you see the person inside the truck?"
"No, suh, I ain't."
"What kind of pickup was it?"
"Just a beat-up old truck. Brown, I think. I would have brought the gun in this morning, but I had to go to school."
"You did fine."
"Mr. Dave?"
"Yeah?"
"I didn't know about the man getting killed at the daiquiri drive-by till this afternoon. My mother thinks I'm in trouble."